In recent years, along with the advent of the Internet technology, this Internet has increasingly been used for buying and selling goods and services by receiving and transmitting data through the Internet. Such transactions for buying and selling goods and services through the Internet can be made between different countries so that different languages are often used between a server system for selling goods and services and a client system which will buy goods and services on the Internet. Accordingly, the necessity arises of translating languages between a server system and a client system.
An exemplary relay server for the purpose of converting languages is EtoJ Proxy (English-to-Japanese word translation server EtoJ_Proxy- for Web by “DeleGate” Proxy, 1995.11, Yoshihiro Ugawa, Manabu Akimoto, Nobuyuki Fujita and Yutaka Satoh, World Wide Web Conference '95). This relay server is characterized in that a word for word dictionary is provided in order to translate an English response from the server of a client-server system into a Japanese response and transmit the response after conversion. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing an implementation of the system.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, this relay server 13 is located between a server system 1 and a client system 2. When a request for the URL of the server system 1 is sent from the client system 2 to the server system 1, the URL is transferred to the Server system 1 as it is through a client message receiving section 133 and a server message transmitting section 131. Then, the relay server 13 receives, through a server message receiving section 135, a WWW hyper text markup language document (HTML) which has been written in English and transferred from the server system 1 while each word of the text data of this HTML is converted into a Japanese word by the use of an EtoJ word for word dictionary 134 in an EtoJ word for word translating section 132 and returned to the client system 2 through a client message transmitting section 136.
This type of the relay server 13 is designed for the purpose of converting a document which has been described in a certain language into another language for reading and therefore it is necessary to provide a word for word dictionary 134 having a sufficient number of entries so that few implementations have been put to practical use at this time. Also, this type of the relay server 13 serves to perform a unidirectional translation process of only the response from the server system 1 and therefore it can not be applied to a bi-directional online system which has to convert one language to another language for the request from the client system 2 and the response from the server system 1.
Meanwhile, pre-arranged accommodation systems, delivery systems and so forth are examples in which a server system is accessed by client systems to refer to and update associated data. In the case of these system, language-dependent information such as customer information and language-independent information such as numerical values are input to the server system 1 while said language-dependent information and said language-independent information are output from the server system to the client system 2.
In the case where it is desired for these system to implement additional functions for providing services in another language corresponding to the existing services in the current language, for example, for providing services in English in addition to in Japanese, the necessity arises of extending the client server system for implementing additional functions. In the prior art technique, such extension of the system has been implemented in the following manner.
At the end of the server system where a system 204 is implemented with data 201 in a current language 1, as illustrated in FIG. 2, server systems (205, 206, . . . ) implemented with data 202, 203 in different languages 2 to n are added anew in order to operate on line together with the system 204 implemented with data 201 in the language 1. Also, as illustrated in FIG. 3, another implementation of an improved system 208 is possible by extending a server system in a language 1 with additional functions required for providing services in different languages 2 to n.
On the other hand, at the end of the client system where an existing system 209 is implemented, as illustrated in FIG. 4, client systems 210, 211, . . . each of which can be operated for adding, updating, deleting or referring to data only in the other language are added anew in order to operate on line together with the system 209 operating in the current language. Alternatively, as illustrated in FIG. 5, the client system can be improved for providing services in different languages by implementing functions 212 therein.
Also, the server/client system can be designed for practical operation by combining the above two types of server systems and the above two types of client systems.
In the case of the implementation as illustrated in FIG. 2 where a server has to be developed anew for the other language, if new systems 205, 206, . . . are to be added without halting the existing system 204, the implementation can be applied only to services in which any one of the systems shall not refer to information in the language of another system, for example, in the form of independent services for the respective languages such as a service for use inside of Japan, a service for use inside of U.S.A., and so forth.
Accordingly, in the case of this kind of server systems, for example, when a hotel in US wants to provide an online booking service in English and in Japanese, it is needed to manage data of language-independent information to be controlled under unified management such as information about available rooms, avoiding data redundancy among the server systems.
Also, in the case of this example, it is impossible to partially provide service(s) in another language on the basis of the existing services in the current language, for example, to provide, in Japanese, only part of the services which have been provided in English while providing the remainder only in English.
Conversely, in the case where a server system is extended as illustrated in FIG. 3 by making use of information in another language together with information in the existing language, the system 208 as operating has to be halted for extension so that stoppage of the service is inevitable while, in the case of a wide-scale and complicated system, development works also become wide-scale and complicated.
Furthermore, in the case where a server system is extended as described above, it is necessary to continue providing services in the current language for current clients and therefore to maintain upward compatibility with the current server system in the current language.
Furthermore, in the case where a server system is implemented in each language to provide services in different languages in addition to the server system in the current language as illustrated in FIG. 2, unified management of language-independent data is required among the server systems. In order to implement this in the configuration as illustrated in FIG. 2, it is needed to provide additional functions for managing the language-independent data among the existing server and all the servers other than its own system or to provide a separate data management system for synchronizing data under unified management among the server systems. Furthermore, there is a problem that it is impossible to provide only part of data in Japanese on the basis of English information.
Also, in the case where an existing system is extended to an multilingual system for providing services in different languages in addition to the current language as illustrated in FIG. 3, stoppage of the service is inevitable and therefore it is difficult to apply to a wide-scale and complicated system. Also after updating the server, it is needed to maintain compatibility with the previous system in order that existing clients can make use of the new system.
In order to solve these problems, it is an object of the present invention to unify management of language-independent information without modifying the existing system for providing online services in a plurality of languages in a client-server system as an online system for selling goods and services through the Internet.
On the other hand, in recent years, contents on the Internet have increasingly been accessed from a plurality of countries along with the advent of the Internet technology.
However, most currently available contents have been provided only in the native language of each contents provider while some contents have been provided in two languages, i.e., in English and in the native language at the best. In other words, it can be said that there are few contents which have been provided in more than two languages.
Such provision of contents having been provided in two languages at the best becomes a factor impeding revitalization of the online electronic transactions and a barrier of the social infrastructure which can be used with fairness to all ages.
In addition to this, it is necessary for providing contents in a plurality of languages to repeat the provision of the same contents in the respective languages and therefore require very troublesome work taking more efforts for creating and updating contents and so forth. Furthermore, while it is inevitable to give users the contract detail and the notabilia with reasonable accuracy in the case of online electronic transactions and so forth, a number of troubles have arisen under the current circumstances.
Another invention has been made in the circumstances as described above in order to provide an information processing method and a program for handling different languages with ease when providing contents in different languages.